Project 10,000: The White Paper

In my last post, I talked about an idea for implementing student choice and project-based learning in a traditional school with few resources required. I’ve finished writing a white paper detailing exactly why this would work and a model for implementation. The entire paper is seven pages long, so I’m not going to post the entire paper here, but I’d still appreciate feedback. I’d like to bring it to my school board and/or anybody else who would care to listen, so if there’s anything in the paper that seems inappropriate or unprofessional, please do let me know.

Discussion

4 thoughts on “Project 10,000: The White Paper”

I’m looking forward to reading this, as creating a similar paper has been on my to-do list for about a year. Thank you so much for getting us all started! Hopefully your paper can be a tool for many. I’ll respond in further detail once I’ve read it.

What I like most is how the write-up connects different kinds of learning to one another – from game-based to to project-based, for example, with inquiry and an acknowledgement of kids’ authority as foundations.

How do we help schools understand that a purely academic education isn’t the best one or the best one to offer?

I don’t know your audience, but I did have a few suggestions that might make it more palatable:

a) Don’t endorse dropping out of high school. I totally get your point (I did that very thing to go to MIT :-), but it might be a red flag that would keep some people from reading the rest of it.

b) I loved the “panoptic” reference, but it might be lost on your audience. Plus, by expecting students to internalize the norms rather than have them explicitly spelled out, your school would arguably more panoptican. 🙂

c) Some of the projects you suggest (e.g., forging a sword) may require very specialized venues with competent supervision and non-trivial liability concerns. If your audience is easily spooked, you may want to downplay those.

Again, none of these are meant as criticisms, merely attempts to anticipate what your audience might negatively react to. If your board is sufficiently enlightened, then maybe none of these matters.

By the way, I’m pushing the term “inverted school” (a play on ‘flipped school’) to describe this approach of making extracurricular projects the heart of the curriculum, and traditional schooling the supplement. What do you think?